b'A BARLEY STORYAfter 17 years on the market, CDC Copeland has been selected to receive the Seed of the Year award. We look back on the history of the variety and how it came to be so successful.ERIC LEFOL REMEMBERSlooking at a new barley cultivar in 1995 and thinking there was something special about it. A young barley breeder at the Crop Development Centre in Saskatoon, Sask. at the time, he was assisting fellow breeders Bryan Harvey and Brian Rossnagel in picking out cultivars that looked promising.It was a very lovely, very good-looking variety. You could spot it in a trial right away. It was elegant, in a word, remembers Lefol, now 57 and serving as manager for the Fdration des francophones de Saskatoon.That variety would be named CDC Copeland and would come to dominate the brewing world along with AC Metcalfe. Since then, CDC Copeland has been grown on over 10 million acres in Western Canada and has pro-duced enough barley to brew 30 bottles of beer for every person on earth.Considering everything it has accomplished, CDC Copeland has been selected by members of Germinations editorial board to receive the Seed of the Year Award for 2019-2020. Varieties are evaluated on their performance, presence in the value chain, sustainability, marketability, innovation, end use potential, overall impact and contribu-tion to the Canadian agri-food industry.CDC Copeland is marketed in Canada and the United States by SeCan, available through a network of over 500 seed grower members across Canada. In 2019 SeCan members sold more CDC Copeland than any other year in the history of the variety. Eric Lefol is credited with helping breed CDC Copeland. He is now manager of the Fdration des francophones de Saskatoon.Early DaysIn the early years of the release of CDC Copeland, it was not necessarily the malt quality that drove its marketgrowth and product availability until the end-use market share increasesit was strong agronomics. Farmerswas fully ready to embrace the variety as a mainstream began growing CDC Copeland as it provided a true dualmalt variety.purposeit offered strong grain or silage yield alongI didnt think it would be so big at first. CDC with the potential for use as malt. Copeland came out before the rise of the craft brewing The key was the absence of an agronomic downsideindustry, remembers Bryan Harvey, whose program at for growing the variety. This allowed for a slow steadythe CDC developed the variety and who served as malt 16GERMINATION.CA JANUARY 2020'